The Harvard University chapter of the Society of Physics Students (SPS) has won an Outstanding Chapter Award from the SPS National Office for the academic year 2017-2018. This is the highest level of distinction given to fewer than 10 percent...

Physics World is pleased to announce that Liujun Zou from Harvard University in the US has won the magazine’s inaugural science-communication award, which was set up "to celebrate the huge advances that China is making in science, engineering and medicine"...

In the world of quantum computing, interaction is everything. For computers to work at all, bits — the ones and zeros that make up digital information — must be able to interact and hand off data for processing. The same goes for the quantum bits, or qubits, that make up quantum computers...

The study of exotic one-dimensional states, particularly those at the edges of topological materials, demand new experimental probes that can access the interplay between charge and spin degrees of freedom. One potential approach is to use a single spin probe...

Quantum science—the physics and engineering of the world at sub-microscopic scales—got a boost today as Harvard formally announced an initiative that will combine basic and applied research into the realm of the very small, as well as foster collaborations...

Quantum Hall ferromagnets are among the purest magnets in the world — and one of the most difficult to study. These 2D magnets can only be made in temperatures less than a degree above absolute zero...

Working in a basement lab at Harvard, a group of researchers led by John Doyle, the Henry B. Silsbee Professor of Physics, has been part of a team to make the most precise measurement ever of the shape of the field around an electron, and the results suggest that some theories for what lies beyond the standard model of physics need to return to the drawing board...

In this talk, based on his book What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics, Dr. Becker will explain the puzzles at the heart of quantum physics, why they matter, and what really went down between Einstein and Bohr 90 years ago...

In a new study, researchers at Northwestern, Harvard and Yale universities examined the shape of an electron's charge with unprecedented precision to confirm that it is perfectly spherical. A slightly squashed charge could have indicated unknown, hard-to-detect heavy particles in the electron's presence...

This book is a collection of 57 very challenging math problems with detailed solutions. It is written for anyone who enjoys pondering difficult problems for great lengths of time. The problems are mostly classics...

Colloidal clusters consist of small numbers of colloidal particles bound by weak short-range attractions. The equilibrium probability of observing a cluster in a particular geometry is well described by a statistical mechanical model originally developed for molecules...

The already buzzing field of topological physics could be about to explode. For the first time, researchers have systematically scoured through entire databases of materials in search of ones that harbour topological states...

Metallizaton of hydrogen and its isotopes has been one of the great challenging problems in condensed matter physics. There are two pathways to metallic hydrogen: very high pressure and low temperatures to make solid metallic hydrogen, or intermediate pressures...

The problem with string theory, according to some physicists, is that it makes too many universes. It predicts not one but some 10500 versions of spacetime, each with their own laws of physics. But with so many universes on the table, how can the theory explain why ours has the features it does?..

Subir Sachdev is a co-recepient of the 2018 Dirac Medal by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics for "contributions toward understanding novel phases in strongly interacting many-body systems, introducing original cross-disciplinary techniques."

Ultracold molecules are ideal platforms for many important applications, ranging from quantum simulation and quantum information processing to precision tests of fundamental physics. Producing trapped, dense samples of ultracold molecules is a challenging task...

For centuries, people have looked at living things and wondered how they work, why they look the way they do, and how they adapt to changing environments. Yet despite the enormous strides made in understanding such developments with the advent of such aids as single-cell sequencing...

I had the good fortune to meet Stephen Hawking in 1982. This was to be the beginning of a long and vibrant scientific interaction and friendship. I was fresh out of graduate school and Stephen could still speak in a growly voice. It took me a few days to understand what he was saying but I managed to do it. And there was a lot to say!...

The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has been used in biological research studies for more than 100 years. We have a deep understanding of how fruit fly genes function to control growth, behavior, and many other processes...

The Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations has named Prof. Cora Dvorkin the 2018 Harvard Scientist of the Year. The students of the Harvard Foundation nominate a scientist to recognize that individual’s outstanding work in science, engineering, and mathematics yearly...

Michael Berry, Melville Wills Professor of Physics (Emeritus) at the University of Bristol, UK, will talk about the Aharonov-Bohm effect which concerns the role in quantum physics of the vector potential of an impenetrable line of magnetic flux...

What is inside an atom between the nucleus and the electron? Usually there is nothing, but why could there not be other particles too? If the electron orbits the nucleus at a great distance, there is plenty of space in between for other atoms. A "giant atom" could be created, filled with ordinary atoms...

Try a quick experiment: Take two flashlights into a dark room and shine them so that their light beams cross. Notice anything peculiar? The rather anticlimactic answer is, probably not. That's because the individual photons that make up light do not interact...

Ever since the dawn of civilization we have been driven by a desire to know - to understand the physical world and probe the laws of nature. But are there limits to human knowledge? Are some things beyond the predictive powers of science...

Zhengwei Liu and Prof. Arthur Jaffe are leading a new project to expand quon, their pictorial math language developed to help understand quantum information theory, into new fields from algebra to M-theory.

It’s possible that no one knows the electron as well as physicist Gerald Gabrielse. He once held one in a trap for ten months to measure the size of its internal magnet. When it disappeared, he searched for two days before accepting that it was gone. “You get kind of fond of your particles after a while,” he says...

Prof. Peter Galison wins Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics (APS) for his "outstanding contributions to the history of physics, especially for elucidating the complicated roles of experiment, instrumentation, and theory in the production of scientific knowledge, and for sharing his insights via award-winning scholarship, generous mentoring, and innovative filmmaking."

Quantum mechanics incorporates some very non-intuitive properties of matter. Quantum superposition, for example, allows an atom to be simultaneously in two different states with its spin axis pointed both up and down, or combinations in between...

Prof. Subir Sachdev is a recipient of the 2018 Lars Onsager Prize "for his seminal contributions to the theory of quantum phase transitions, quantum magnetism, and fractionalized spin liquids, and for his leadership in the physics community."

An article in the Nov-Dec 2017 issue of American Scientist on pictorial mathematical languages features the Quon Language created by Harvard mathematicians Zhengwei Liu, Alex Wozniakowski, and Arthur Jaffe: Read D. Silver, "The New Language of Mathematics".

Nature has a way of making complex shapes from a set of simple growth rules. The curve of a petal, the swoop of a branch, even the contours of our face are shaped by these processes. What if we could unlock those rules...

When a wavelength of light moves through a material, its crests and troughs get condensed or stretched, depending on the properties of the material. How much the crests of a light wave are condensed is expressed as a ratio called the refractive index...

Research found that altering the volume of a cell changed its internal dynamics, including the rigidness of the matrix lining the outer surface. In stem cells, removing water condenses the cell, influencing the stem cells to become stiff pre-bone cells...

Like a string of pearls, the spine is made of a series of similar vertebrae. A so-called segmentation clock creates this repetitive arrangement in developing embryos: Each time the clock ticks, a vertebra starts to form...

A future quantum computer might use photonic qubits to move information around, but the qubits need to be transferred to a stationary medium such as atoms to perform computations. Given the weakness of the light-matter interaction, the transfer often requires a large ensemble of atoms, which can collectively take on a single photonic qubit...

Steven Torrisi, a doctoral candidate in Kaxiras group, has been awarded a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship to support his Materials Physics research. DOE CSGF was established in 1991 to train...

Considerable interest in new single-photon detector technologies has been scaling in this past decade. Nowadays, quantum optics and quantum information applications are, among others, one of the main precursors for the accelerated...

Mahadevan Lab has developed a simple device to recreate complex birdsongs with the help of soft materials and mathematical modeling. The study finds that the inherent complexity in birdsongs might actually be the result of a simple controllable instability in the structure of the specialized organ used to create song, known as a syrinx...

The physics department is hosting a section of the MIT course, "How to Make (Almost) Anything," for the 4th time! This course covers a wide range of fabrication techniques, including laser cutting, 3D printing, PCB fabrication and design, embedded processing, molding and casting, and composites...

Confined to a two-dimensional plane, electrons in a strong magnetic field travel along the edge in one-dimensional quantum Hall channels that are protected against backscattering. These channels can be used as solid-state analogs of monochromatic beams of light...

Multiple descriptions of the half-filled Landau level, an exotic phase of matter seen in two-dimensional electron gases, have led to incompatible pictures that are widely believed to represent two distinct phases of matter. A new analysis suggests...

Self-healing materials aren’t new — researchers at SEAS have developed self-healing hydrogels, which rely on water to incorporate reversible bonds that can promote healing. However, engineering self-healing properties in dry materials — such as rubber — has proven more challenging...

Strongly interacting electrons lined up along a string can experience the so-called spin-charge separation, where the electrons "split" into effective carriers of spin and charge, which then move independently. This phenomenon has been observed, somewhat indirectly, in solids...

So, you’ve genetically engineered a malaria-resistant mosquito, now what? How many mosquitos would you need to replace the disease-carrying wild type? How many mosquitos would you need to replace the disease-carrying wild type? What is the most effective distribution pattern?...

In a new paper in Physical Review Letters, physicists in Prof. Mikhail Lukin's group, together with colleagues from Spain and Austria, propose a platform for studying topological effects in quantum optical systems which involves 2D atomic emitter arrays in optical lattices...

Information technologies of the future will likely use electron spin — rather than electron charge — to carry information. But first, scientists need to better understand how to control spin and learn to build the spin equivalent of electronic components, from spin transistors, to spin gates and circuits...

Particle interactions have a defining role in many properties of materials, but are often difficult to incorporate into a theoretical framework. Although theories that omit these interactions can describe...

Nabiha Saklayen, who is a 2017 graduating PhD in Physics, is a Program Director for the new campaign "I Am A Scientist." The campaign is a collaboration between artists, educators, and researchers in the Boston area...

Driving a quantum liquid - by subjecting it to some external force - can generate exotic phases of matter, but such phases are unstable. A suite of mathematical methods reveals the origins of these instabilities and identifies physical manifestations that can be observed in current experiments.

Physicists considering a foray into the study of molecules are often warned that "a diatomic molecule is one atom too many!". Now John Doyle and colleagues at Harvard University have thrown this caution to the wind and tackled laser cooling of a triatomic molecule with success

Traditionally speaking, crystals - like salt, sugar or even diamonds - are simply periodic arrangements of atoms in a three-dimensional lattice. Time crystals, on the other hand, take that notion of periodically-arranged atoms and add a fourth dimension...

The quantum Hall effect supports a set of chiral edge states at the boundary of a two-dimensional system. A superconductor contacting these states can provide correlations of the quasiparticles in the dissipationless edge states...

Manufacturing complex bio-inspired shapes in the lab is often time consuming and costly. developed a new geometrical framework to explain how previous precipitation patterns grew and even predicted new structures...

It is well known that as plants grow, their stems and shoots respond to outside signals like light and gravity. But if plants all have similar stimuli, why are there so many different stem shapes? Why does a weeping willow grow downwards while nearby poison ivy shoots upwards?...

Dr. David Morin's new book, Special Relativity: For the Enthusiastic Beginner, is written for high school and college students learning about special relativity for the first time. It will appeal to the reader who has a healthy level of enthusiasm for understanding how and why the various results of special relativity come about...

Time crystals are hypothetical structures that pulse without requiring any energy — like a ticking clock that never needs winding. The pattern repeats in time in much the same way that the atoms of a crystal repeat in space...

Two Harvard graduate students want to make curing blood cancer or HIV as easy as pressing a button. Ph.D. candidates Nabiha Saklayen and Marinna Madrid have launched a startup to develop a simple, push-button device...

Galileo called mathematics the “language with which God wrote the universe.” He described a picture-language, and now that language has a new dimension. Prof. Arthur Jaffe, postdoc Zhengwei Liu, and researcher Alex Wozniakowski have developed...

In a new Nature Nanotechnology article, Hongkun Park and Donhee Ham (SEAS) groups describe a new tool they developed which is capable of high-precision electrophysiological recording of a large network of electrogenic cells...

Two-dimensional materials offer a promising platform for exploring condensed matter phenomena and developing technological applications. However, the reduction of material dimensions to the atomic scale poses a challenge...

Prof. John Kovac has been named a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). He was recognized for his work in advancing the most sensitive measurements of polarization of the cosmic microwave background...

The story of time crystals - whose lowest-energy configurations are periodic in time rather than space - epitomizes the creative ideas, controversy, and vigorous discussion that lie at the core of the scientific process. Originally theorized by Frank Wilczek in 2012, time crystals were met with widespread attention...

In spin ladder systems, a single characteristic length scale controls the behavior of the spin polarization. In in a recent article in Physical Review Letters, Harvard Physics graduate and currently an Associate in Lukin's group, Norman Yao...

Primordial features are one of the most important extensions of the Standard Model of cosmology, providing a wealth of information on the primordial Universe, ranging from discrimination between inflation and alternative scenarios...

The recent surge in research on metal-halide-perovskite solar cells has led to a seven-fold increase of efficiency, from ~3% in early devices to over 22% in research prototypes. Oft-cited reasons for this increase are...

Atoms, photons, and other quantum particles are often capricious and finicky by nature; very rarely at a standstill, they often collide with others of their kind. But if such particles can be individually corralled and controlled in large numbers, they may be harnessed as quantum bits, or qubits...

Electrons in a solid can team up to form so-called quasiparticles, which lead to new phenomena. Physicists have now studied previously unidentified quasiparticles in a new class of atomically thin semiconductors...

By using superconducting materials through which electrons can move without any loss of energy, physicists hope to build quantum devices that would require significantly less power.
But there's a problem...

The nonequilibrium dynamics of many-body quantum systems are tricky to study experimentally or theoretically. As an experimental setting, dilute atomic gases offer an advantage over electrons in metals. In this environment, the heavier atoms...

Congratulations to Prof. Jenny Hoffman who, for a third time in a row, won the national title in "North Coast 24," the USA Track & Field National Championship 24 Hour Run, held annually in Cleveland, Ohio!

In the last couple of years, deep learning techniques have transformed the world of artificial intelligence. One by one, the abilities and techniques that humans once imagined were uniquely our own have begun to fall to the onslaught...

The Physics Department is pleased to announce that Dr. Roxanne Guenette, currently the Ernest Rutherford Fellow in the Physics Department at the University of Oxford, will be joining the faculty as Assistant Professor on July 1, 2017.

Physicists have proposed a method for entangling hundreds of atoms, and then entangling a dozen or so groups of these hundreds of atoms, resulting in a quantum network of thousands of entangled atoms...

The analysis of Fourier-transformed scanning tunnelling microscopy images with subatomic resolution is a common tool for studying the properties of quasiparticle excitations in strongly correlated materials...

Topological quantum phases cannot be characterized by Ginzburg–Landau type order parameters, and are instead described by non-local topological invariants. Experimental platforms capable of realizing such exotic states now include...

The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) has issued a new Report, Advancing Quantum Information Science: National Challenges and Opportunities, which prominently features results from several Harvard Physics research groups.

Postdoc Igor Pikovski has been awarded the Branco Weiss Fellowship by the ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology). The Fellowship, which is given to outstanding postdoctoral researchers selected from a pool of international applicants...

A ℤ2 fractionalized Fermi liquid (FL*) is a novel state of strongly correlated quantum matter. Although it is metallic, it violates Luttinger’s theorem on the volume enclosed by the Fermi surface obeyed by conventional metals; this is possible due to the presence of emergent gauge excitations. In a new Physical Review B editors' suggested article describes a study of the superconducting states...

The Center for Elementary Particle and Astroparticle Physics KCETA of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, has awarded Prof. Lisa Randall the 2015 Julius Wess Award for her research on unifying the fundamental forces of physics.

We may have glimpsed liquid hydrogen abruptly changing into metallic hydrogen, which is the same stuff in the core of Jupiter. But how and when does this transition from gas to liquid metal occur? How does it behave?... Continue reading the article by Leah Burrows: Unveiling Jupiter’s Mysteries.

While the novel theory may never live up to the early hype, its innovative tools have helped scientists for decades, and the best may be yet to come. (Read the overview of the history of string theory by Steve Nadis: Discover Magazine, June 14, 2016.)

Prof. Ashvin Vishwanath, together with four colleagues, has been awarded the 2016 European Physical Society Condensed Matter Division Europhysics Prize "for the theoretical prediction, the experimental discovery and the theoretical analysis of a magnetic skyrmion phase in MnSi, a new state of matter"...

Harvard Physics and JILA cientists propose a space-based gravitational wave detector consisting of two spatially separated, drag-free satellites sharing ultra-stable optical laser light over a single baseline. Each satellite contains an optical lattice atomic clock, which serves as a sensitive, narrowband detector of the local frequency of the shared laser light...

The relation between structure and dynamics in glasses is not fully understood. A new approach based on machine learning now reveals a correlation between softness - a structural property - and glassy dynamics...

Topology and geometry are essential to our understanding of modern physics, underlying many foundational concepts from high-energy theories, quantum information, and condensed-matter physics. In condensed-matter systems...

Experimental searches for the electron electric-dipole moment (EDM) probe new physics beyond the standard model. The current best EDM limit was set by the ACME Collaboration, constraining time-reversal symmetry (T) violating physics at the TeV energy scale...

Contacting solids that move relative to each other in a fluid environment abound in many settings such as soft contact lenses in eyes, animal joints, and bearings in rotating machinery. Motion is inevitably accompanied by flow and deformation...

JILA physicists have extended the capability of their powerful laser "combing" technique to identify the structures of large, complex molecules of the sort found in explosives, pharmaceuticals, fuels and the gases around stars...

As population growth continues to outpace development of water infrastructure in many countries, desalination (the removal of salts from seawater) at high energy efficiency will likely become a vital source of fresh water...

Graduate students David Levonian and Harry McNamara have won National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowships. NDSEG is awarded to U.S. citizens and nationals who intend to pursue a doctoral degree...

Little string theories are UV complete nonlocal six-dimensional theories decoupled from gravity in which there is an intrinsic string scale. In this paper, we present a systematic approach to the construction of supersymmetric LSTs...

The first results from the NOvA experiment, which set new constraints on charge-parity violation in neutrinos and on the ordering of neutrino masses, have been reported in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters. Those results are from the first search...

Hydrogen and its isotopes, deuterium and hydrogen deuteride (HD), are the simplest and most abundant elements in the universe. At a sufficient pressure the solids are predicted to dissociate into atoms and become metallic with possible...

The new book by David Morin, Probability: For the Enthusiastic Beginner, is written for high school and college students learning about probability for the first time. It will appeal to the reader who has a healthy level of enthusiasm...

Graduate students Benjamin Augenbraun, Rebecca Engelke, and Geoffrey Ji have been awarded 2016 Graduate Research Fellowships by National Science Foundation. The Fellowship Program "recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students...

A new Physical Review Letter by Prof. Philip Kim and colleagues from Columbia University, Rice University, and National Institute for Material Science, Tsukuba, Japan, reports the enhancement of the thermoelectric power (TEP) in graphene...

Congratulations to Prof. Howard Georgi for receiving the 2016 Mentoring Award of the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society. The Award recognizes Prof. Georgi's "unique dedication to mentoring...

The objective of the Lee Osheroff Richardson Science Prize is to promote and recognize the novel work of young scientists working in the fields of low temperatures, high magnetic fields or surface science in North and South America.

Optical lattices are a promising platform for simulating the many-body physics that occurs in solids. In lattices filled with cold bosonic atoms, “quantum microscopy” makes it possible to watch quantum phase transitions as they unravel...

The drying or water-retention process cannot typically be observed directly in porous materials due to their opacity. In a new study, Prof. David Weitz and colleagues from SEAS and Laboratoire Navier, Université Paris-Est, relied on a simple glass channel...

The currently prevalent one-size-fits-all approach to designing digital products inadvertently - but inevitably - leads to discrimination by making some people systematically a little more likely to succeed than others...

Explore black holes, gravity, and quantum systems in a series of Morris Loeb Lectures in Physics presented by Juan Maldacena, Carl Feinberg Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, whose work focuses on quantum gravity...

Postdoc Vivek Venkatachalam, with the help of colleagues in Prof. Aravinthan Samuel's Lab, UMass Worcester, and University of Toronto, built a microscope capable of uncovering representations of sensory input and motor output of individual neurons...

Interactions between particles in quantum many-body systems can lead to collective behavior described by hydrodynamics. One such system is the electron-hole plasma in graphene near the charge neutrality point, which can form...

Prof. L. Mahadevan and colleagues from SEAS, Finland and France have provided the first experimental evidence of the theory of differential growth and demonstrated that physical forces — not just biochemical processes alone — play a critical role...

Origami describes rules for creating folded structures from patterns on a flat sheet, but does not prescribe how patterns can be designed to fit target shapes. In an article in Nature Materials, Prof. L. Mahadevan and colleagues describe...

In the fall of 2015, twenty-one students representing a diverse cross-section of Harvard community participated in the Harvard Section of the "How to Make (Almost) Anything" class. This course was taught by MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld and integrates a wide range of fabrication modalities. The Harvard section was led by Rob Hart and members of the Instructional Physics Labs...

Professors L. Mahadevan and Jennifer Lewis, and a team of scientists at the Wyss Institute, SEAS, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have evolved their microscale 3D printing technology to the fourth dimension, time...

Harvard Physics grad Greg Kestin (PhD 2014) has published the first video in a new "What The Physics?!" series. Each episode will explore something surprising or really interesting related to physics...

The past few years have brought foundational results in particle physics with both the Higgs discovery and the measurement of "theta 13" the last of the unknown mixi2ng angles. With a large value of theta 13, the neutrino community is poised...

Do you want to make moving art? Are you curious about making things move with simple computer programs? Come to the Physics teaching labs, and create interactive kinetic sculpture programmed with Arduino microcontroller boards...

Viruses such as influenza spread so effectively, and as a result can be so deadly to their hosts, because of their ability to spontaneously self-assemble in large numbers. If researchers can understand how viruses assemble, they may be able to design drugs...

Certain bacteria swim by rotating a single helical filament, moving forwards and backwards with similar speeds. The discovery that the torque is not equal in both directions links them to multifilament species with opposite filament handedness.

Black hole horizons have been shown to have characteristic entropies and temperatures. A new investigation shows similarities between the entropy of a black hole and a metallic state of high-temperature superconductors.

Exploiting the light-like properties of carriers in graphene could allow extreme non-classical forms of electronic transport to be realized. In this vein, finding ways to confine and direct electronic wavesthrough nanoscale...

The modeling of the electronic structure is the key to understanding layered transition-metal dichalcogenides heterostructures. In a new, editors-recommended paper in Physical Review B, Prof. Efthimios Kaxiras and...

The capture and storage of solar energy at the individual level drives inextricably towards the heart of this energy challenge by addressing the triumvirate of secure, carbon neutral and plentiful energy...

In a Letter in Nature Physics, an international team of reserchers from Brookhaven National Laboratory, Cornell University, Harvard, and other institutions, have characterized a key arrangement of electrons in a high-temperature superconductor...

Sixty-six million years ago, an object the size of a city descended from space to crash into Earth, creating a devastating cataclysm that killed off the dinosaurs, along with three-quarters of the other species on the planet. What was its origin?...

Prof. Jene Golovchenko is a co-recipient of the Fannie Cox Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching. The prize is awarded annually in recognition of exceptional teaching in introductory science classes...

Metamaterials with a refractive index of zero exhibit physical properties such as infinite phase velocity and wavelength. However, there is no way to implement these materials on a photonic chip, restricting the investigation and application of zero-index phenomena to simple shapes and small scales...

What happens when an isolated quantum system is set in motion from an initial nonequilibrium state that possesses certain orders? In classical thermodynamics, this problem is exemplified by the irreversible expansion of a gas in an isolated chamber after suddenly doubling the chamber size...

60 of the Physics Department’s postdoctoral and research scholars enjoyed the Third Annual Retreat at MIT Endicott House in Dedham, MA. The day included talks by Dennis Overbye, Deputy Science Editor, New York Times...

We can launch an energy revolution that drastically decreases CO2 emission and other deleterious consequences associated with fossil fuel burning. Energy extraction can be cut by more than 50% by converting fossil fuel burning engines...

As builders go, termites don’t have many tools at their disposal — just their bodies, soil, and saliva. For guidance they have nothing to go on save variations in wind speed and direction and fluctuations in temperature as the sun rises and sets...

Amorphous nanoparticles often dissolve more rapidly than their crystalline counterparts, which can be useful in applications such as drug delivery. Professors Michael Brenner and David Weitz, together with colleagues from SEAS...

Medical implants mimic the softness of human tissue by mixing liquids such oil with long silicone polymers to create a squishy, wet gel. While implants have improved dramatically over the years, there is still a chance of the liquid leaking...

This conference brought together a diverse group of physicists and educators whose career paths have intersected with Andy's and who share his passion for Physics. Get more information and see the slideshow of the event.

Pushing the frontiers of condensed-matter magnetism requires the development of tools that provide real-space, few-nanometre-scale probing of correlated-electron magnetic excitations under ambient conditions...

Electron microscopy is a powerful technique for taking snapshots of particles or images at near-atomic resolution. An international group of scientists studied free-floating platinum nanoparticles using electron microscopy and liquid cells...

The Rashba effect, discovered in 1959 by a Soviet-American theoretical physicist Emmanuel Rashba, now a Harvard Physics Research Scholar, continues to supply fertile ground for fundamental research and applications...

When I first caught wind that there was going a People's Sculpture Race in Cambridge, writes Kim Bernard, the 2015 Harvard Physics Artist-in-Residence, I proposed the idea, to the Wednesday physics lunch gang, that we put our heads together...

Prof. Markus Greiner and members of his lab test a new technique for imaging of individual fermionic lithium atoms in a single layer of a 3D optical lattice. To preserve the density distribution during fluorescence imaging...

The Physics Department is delighted to announce the promotion of Matthew Schwartz to Professor of Physics with tenure. Matt received his B.A. in Mathematics and Biophysics and M.A. in Mathematics from University of Pennsylvania in 1998 and Ph.D. from Princeton in 2003. After doing postdoctoral work at Berkeley and at Johns Hopkins, he joined Harvard as an Assistant Professor in 2008.

Magnetic resonance techniques not only provide powerful imaging tools that have revolutionized medicine, but they have a wide spectrum of applications in other fields of science such as biology, chemistry...

Light-driven chemical reactions on semiconductor surfaces have potential for addressing energy and pollution needs through efficient chemical synthesis; however, little is known about the time evolution of excited states...

Prof. Xiaowei Zhuang and members of her group have devised a method of visualizing RNA molecules inside cells so that the identity, location, and abundance of more than 1,000 different RNA species can be determined at the same time...

Atom- and site-resolved experiments with ultracold atoms in optical lattices provide a powerful platform for the simulation of strongly correlated materials. In Rapid Communication in Physical review A*...

The intersystem crossing (ISC) is an important process in many solid-state atomlike impurities. For example, it allows the electronic spin state of the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond to be initialized and read out using optical fields at ambient temperatures...

Assembling inorganic nanomaterials on graphene is of interest in the development of nanodevices and nanocomposite materials, and the ability to align such inorganic nanomaterials on the graphene surface is expected to lead to improved functionalities...

At long last, here is the thoroughly revised and updated third edition of the hugely successful Art of Electronics. It is widely accepted as the best single authoritative book on electronic circuit design...

This seminar is a lecture from Life Sciences 1a, a course taken by approximately 500 freshmen each year as an introduction to chemistry and biology. The course covers the fundamentals of chemistry and their application to biology...

The rapid squirt of a proteinaceous slime jet endows velvet worms (Onychophora) with a unique mechanism for defence from predators and for capturing prey by entangling them in a disordered web that immobilizes their target...

Full control over the dynamics of interacting, indistinguishable quantum particles is an important prerequisite for the experimental study of strongly correlated quantum matter and the implementation of high-fidelity quantum information processing...

The results of the joint analysis of BICEP2/Keck Array and Planck Collaborations have been published in the latest issue of Physical Review Letter. BICEP2 and Keck Array have observed the same approximately 400 deg2...

Whether the non-Fermi-liquid behavior of fermionic systems, developing in the proximity of a quantum critical point, is stable or not toward the formation of Cooper pairs is a challenging open question in the physics of strongly correlated systems...

Professor Kang-Kuen Ni has been named one of the 2015 Sloan Research Fellows by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Fellowships seek to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise.

A single M5-brane probing G, an ADE-type singularity, leads to a system which has G × G global symmetry and can be viewed as "bifundamental" (G, G) matter. For the AN series, this leads to the usual notion of bifundamental matter. For the other cases it corresponds to a strongly interacting (1, 0) superconformal system in six dimensions...

Prof. Michael Brenner and colleagues from SEAS and Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology have published an article in the latest issue of Nature Communication which describes their study of the spontaneous assembly...

Prof. Eugene Demler has been honoured as a 'Distinguished Scholar' by the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics. This program has been launched by MPQ two years ago "in order to offer outstanding scientists from other research institutes worldwide...

Precise coherent control of the individual electronic spins associated with atomlike impurities in the solid state is essential for applications in quantum information processing and quantum metrology...

Kim Bernard, visiting Artist-in-Residence in the Physics Department, has set up a studio in SciBox 302 for the spring semester. Bernard will be sitting in on physics labs and lectures, using the departments equipment to create new work and is looking forward to collaborating with students, faculty and staff...

Colloidal particles have been used as atom mimics and are often connected together using complementary DNA strands. Postdoc W. Benjamin Rogers and Prof. Vinothan Manoharan controlled the strength of the colloidal "bond" by using a set of competing...

Thermally induced electrical currents, known as Johnson noise, cause fluctuating electric and magnetic fields in proximity to a conductor. These fluctuations are intrinsically related to the conductivity of the metal...

Prof. Eugene Demler has been elected the recipient of a Carl Friedrich Siemens Research Award. This award is conferred in recognition of lifetime achievements in a science field, without any restrictions being placed on the choice of science discipline...

The nitrogen-vacancy (NV) defect center in diamond has demonstrated great capability for nanoscale magnetic sensing and imaging for both static and periodically modulated target fields. However, it remains a challenge...

On January 21, 2015, Willy Shih, Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Management and Practice at the Harvard Business School, gave a leadership workshop to 30 of our Research Scholars. In teams of five, with each person assigned a specific role...

In this Wintersession class, students learned to make small soldered electronic circuits from copper-covered boards or copper film, either for their research or just for fun, using the Modela mill and the vinyl cutter...

Topological excitations keep fascinating physicists since many decades. While individual vortices and solitons emerge and have been observed in many areas of physics, their most intriguing higher dimensional topological relatives, skyrmions...

Nuclear spin imaging at the atomic level is essential for the understanding of fundamental biological phenomena and for applications such as drug discovery. The advent of novel nanoscale sensors promises to achieve the long-standing goal of single-protein...

Kim Bernard, visiting Artist-in-Residence in the Physics Department, has set up a studio in SciBox 302 for the spring semester. She will be working with students in the Physics 15a lab to integrate kinetic art making into existing and new lab projects as natural extensions of the projects themselves.

Henry is a sophomore Physics concentrator; Sabrina is a graduate student in the Harvard Center for the Fundamental Laws of Nature; Tony graduated from our department with a PhD in astrophysics in 2013...

The silicon-vacancy (SiV‾) color center in diamond has attracted attention because of its unique optical properties. It exhibits spectral stability and indistinguishability that facilitate efficient generation of photons...

Single-crystal diamond, with its unique optical, mechanical and thermal properties, has emerged as a promising material with applications in classical and quantum optics. However, the lack of heteroepitaxial growth...

The nature of the pseudogap regime of cuprate superconductors at low hole density remains unresolved. It has a number of seemingly distinct experimental signatures: a suppression of the paramagnetic spin susceptibility at high temperatures, low-energy electronic excitations that extend over arcs in the Brillouin zone...

A recent 'Editor's Suggested' article in Physical Review A is by members of Demler's research group Fabian Grusdt, Aditya Shashi, and Dmitry Abanin. Together with Prof. Demler, they consider a single-impurity atom confined to an optical lattice and immersed in a homogeneous Bose-Einstein condensate...

How do you build a short pulse laser only from materials available 100 years ago? How do you make color holograms, explore how a violin works, measure the "Ether wind"? How can you trap particles with light or build a flute?...

Many species of fungus-harvesting termites build largely empty, massive mound structures which protrude from the ground above their subterranean nests. It has been long proposed that the function of these mounds is to facilitate exchange of heat, humidity, and respiratory gases...

Graduate students Dennis Huang, Siyuan Sun, Bo Liu, and Shu-Heng Shao are the winners of the 2015 Maurice and Gertrude Goldhaber Prize. The prize is awarded annually by the department to its most outstanding current PhD students...

On November 14, 2014, experts from fields as far-ranging as human cognitive neuroscience and neural computation, animal life science, anthropology and culture, space science, current and future technology, and emergency management converged on Radcliffe’s annual Science Symposium...

If physicists want to find their long-sought "theory of everything," they have to get small. And Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg (U Texas, Austin) thinks he knows roughly how small...

For plenty of runners, finishing a marathon is the ultimate achievement, something they do once in a lifetime, if at all. For Prof. Jenny Hoffman, covering the 26.2 miles of a marathon was just a good place to start…

Professor Christopher Stubbs is a member of the High-Z Supernova Search Team which, together with the the Supernova Cosmology Project, have been awarded the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics "for the most unexpected discovery ..."

Harvard Physics Research Scientist Vincent Coljee is one of finalists in the international group of 21 volunteers selected for possible participation in Mars Arctic 365 mission by the Mars Society, dedicated to furthering the exploration and settlement...

Thomson-Reuters Highly Cited Researchers represents some of world’s leading scientific minds. Over 3000 researchers (144 of them in physics) earned the distinction by writing the greatest numbers of reports...

Unwanted interaction between a quantum system and its fluctuating environment leads to decoherence and is the primary obstacle to establishing a scalable quantum information processing architecture. Strategies such as environmental and materials engineering, quantum error correction...

The Harvard Physics Teaching Lab is hosting a section of a course taught by Neil Gershenfeld (MIT) and offered jointly at MIT and Harvard, "How to Make (Almost) Anything." The students work together in the Science Center teaching labs to complete each week's assignment in fabrication...

Impurities in a crystal lattice are the key ingredient in recent efforts to control and apply the coherence and entanglement of spins in condensed-matter systems. The idea that quantum mechanical machines can perform certain information-processing tasks much faster...

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, after a national competition, has selected nineteen Moore Experimental Investigators in Quantum Materials, among them three Harvard Physics professors: Jenny Hoffman, Philip Kim, and Amir Yacoby.

A major limitation in the performance of solar cells happens within the photovoltaic material itself: When photons strike the molecules of a solar cell, they transfer their energy, producing quasi-particles called excitons...

Inertial aquatic swimmers that use undulatory gaits range in length L from a few millimetres to 30 metres, across a wide array of biological taxa. Prof. L. Mahadevan, working with a postdoctoral fellow Mattia Gazzola and a colleague Mederic Argentina from the University of Nice...

The Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists supports and honors outstanding scientists and engineers by encouraging and accelerating innovation through unrestricted funding and by recognizing their extraordinary achievements as vital contributions to science and society.

The convolutions of the human brain are a symbol of its functional complexity and correlated with its information processing capacity. Conversely, loss of folds is correlated with loss of function. But how did the outer surface of the brain, the layered cortex of neuronal gray matter, get its folds?

The Harvard Library launched a new search tool called HOLLIS+. This tool enables discovery of the bulk of the Harvard Library resources in a single unified search, includes finding books and articles together...

Professor Andrew Strominger is one of three scholars awarded the 2014 Dirac Medal by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics for their "crucial contributions to the origin, development and further understanding of string theory"...

Physics graduate students Erik Bauch and Georg Kucsko have developed an online tool for collaborative annotation of scientific publications, Open Rev., which enables scientists discuss science openly, independently of publishers and impact factors...

Topological insulators are a newly discovered phase of matter characterized by gapped bulk states surrounded by conducting boundary states. Since their theoretical discovery, these materials have encouraged intense efforts to study their properties and capabilities...

A number of methods have been proposed recently which exploit multiple highly-correlated interpretations of events, or of jets within an event. For example, Qjets reclusters a jet multiple times and telescoping jets uses multiple cone sizes...

Congratulations to Harvard Physics graduate students Elizabeth Jerison and Debanjan Chowdhury who won the Harvard Merit Scholarship and Nabiha Saklayen who was awarded an International Student Research Fellowship by the Howard Hughes...

A quantum network of atomic clocks could create even more accurate and stable time-keeping devices than present atomic clocks, reports a paper published online this week in Nature Physics. Such a network could have technological applications as well as provide a resource for Earth science studies and fundamental tests...

Among physics students there exists a wide variety of misconceptions, generally thought to be robust and resistant to change. In their Commentary in Nature Physics, Professor Eric Mazur and colleagues from SEAS and John Abbott College, Montreal...

Understanding the dynamics of quantum systems without long-lived excitations (quasiparticles) constitutes an important yet challenging problem. Although numerical techniques can yield results for the dynamics in imaginary time, their reliable continuation to real time has proved difficult...

The nature of fractional quantum Hall (FQH) states is determined by the interplay between the Coulomb interaction and the symmetries of the system. The unique combination of spin, valley, and orbital degeneracies in bilayer graphene is predicted to produce an unusual and tunable sequence of FQH states...

Harvard Physics Junior Fellow Ariel Amir is moving to SEAS to become an Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics and Applied Physics. His research interests encompass several fields, amongs them theory of glasses, biophysics, and structural coloration...

Graduate student Andy Yen is one of the founders of ProtonMail: the first end-to-end encrypted email service which is web based and easy to use. PhotonMail is said to be so secure that its data is inaccessible even to ProtonMail's own servers and and thus cannot be cracked...

Prof. Eric Mazur is the first winner of the Minerva Prize for Advancements in Higher Education. In recognizing Dr. Mazur for his significant contributions to improving higher education, the Minerva Academy specifically noted his development of Peer Instruction...

Superconductivity arises from pairing of electrons on the Fermi surface. Professors Jenny Hoffman and Subir Sachdev, with colleagues from Harvard, MIT, Nagoya University, and Northeastern University report in Science...

Dr. Dalla Torre was awarded the Alon Fellowship for young faculty members by the Israeli Council for Higher Education. He is currently a post-doctorate fellow at the Department of Physics, in the group of Prof. Eugene Demler, and an ITAMP fellow. Next year Dr. Dalla Torre is...

On April 15, students in Andy Strominger’s Spring Freshman Seminar, Black Holes, String Theory and the Fundamental Laws of Nature, met with recent David M. Lee Historical speaker and Nobel laureate Francois Englert and his wife, pictured here with the students after a relaxed evening of questions and answers. Munching on ribs and cornbread, Dr.

Quantum optical switches are important elements of quantum circuits and quantum networks, analogous to transistors in classical electronic circuits. Operated at the fundamental limit where a single quantum of light or matter controls another field or material system...

Ultracold atoms offer a fascinating view of the quantum world. With the quantum gas microscope, invented here at Harvard, we take pictures of individual atoms dancing to the rules of quantum mechanics...

Recent neutron scattering experiments on the spin-1/2 kagome lattice antiferromagnet ZnCu3(OH)6Cl2 (Herbertsmithite) provide the first evidence of fractionalized excitations in a quantum spin liquid state in two spatial dimensions. In contrast to existing theoretical models of both gapped and gapless spin liquids, which give rise...

Graduate students Prahar Mitra, Elliot Schneider, Elizabeth Petrik, Nicholas Schade, Alexandru Lupsasca, Chi-Ming Chang, and Timothy Koby have been awarded the Harvard University Certificate of Distinction in Teaching for the Fall 2013 term by the Derek Bok Center.

The BICEP2 Collaboration, led by Professor John Kovac, has announced the discovery of first direct evidence of cosmic inflation, the expansion of space first proposed in 1981 by Alan Guth of MIT. Watch the VIDEO.

Professors Lisa Randall and Matthew Reece suggest that a smooth disc of dark matter passing through the Galaxy approximately every 35 million years might be the underlying cause of the cycles of increased meteorite activity on Earth, such as the one that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs...

The Society... was established in 1752 by seven distinguished burghers of the city of Haarlem, in the then Republic of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, in order "to promote science" (in the broadest sense, including the "arts")

The genome revolution has created unprecedented opportunities to study human biology, evolution, and disease, and is making it possible to carry out unprecedented studies in the microbial pathogens that affect humans....

If you’re going to teach people engineering, - says Stan Cotreau, the Director of the Physics / SEAS Instiructional Instrument Lab (or the Machine Shop, as it's commonly called) - if you’re going to teach them experimental physics, you’ve got to teach them how to work with their hands.

Electrical signaling plays a fundamental role in biology: our neurons communicate with little electrical blips, our heart is paced by an electrical wave, and every cell in our body powers part of its metabolism from electrical energy in mitochondria...

From the Publisher's Summary: "Providing a comprehensive introduction to quantum field theory, this textbook covers the development of particle physics from its foundations to the discovery of the Higgs boson..."

The physical properties of our planet are intricately tied to the sequence of giant impact events that led to the formation of the Moon. The canonical giant impact model for lunar origin has been called into question by recent geochemical measurements of lunar rocks...

The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics fails to explain dark matter and why matter survived annihilation with antimatter following the Big Bang. Extensions to the SM, such as weak-scale Supersymmetry, may explain one or both of these phenomena by positing the existence of new particles and interactions that are asymmetric under time-reversal (T)...

In 1893, Max Planck, newly appointed professor of physics in Berlin, was seconded to study the department’s Eitz harmonium, capable of dividing an octave into 104 steps. An accomplished musician, Planck learned to play this new instrument and used it to devise experiments in musical temperament...

Super-luminous supernovae that radiate more than 1044 ergs per second at their peak luminosity have recently been discovered in faint galaxies at redshifts of 0.1–4. Some evolve slowly, resembling models of 'pair-instability' supernovae...

The National Science Foundation has awarded a major grant to researchers from Harvard University, Howard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Boston Museum of Science to create a Science and Technology Center on Integrated Quantum Materials...

On September 30, 2013, University of Maryland Professor of Physics Edward "Joe" Redish was the guest speaker at the Harvard Monday Physics Colloquium dedicated to the science of teaching and learning physics...

The fundamental properties of light derive from its constituent particles - massless quanta (photons) that do not interact with one another. However, it has long been known that the realization of coherent interactions between individual photons...

Just three years ago the prospect of finding temperate, rocky worlds around other stars was still the subject of science fiction: none had been found and reasonable estimates put us years or decades away from such a momentous discovery...

The ATLAS Standard Model group workshop will be held in Harvard, 19-21 September, 2013. The first day of the workshop is an open session with invited theory talks. The second and the third days are for ATLAS internal discussions.

Researchers from Harvard, MIT, and the City University of Hong Kong, led by Professors Mikhail Lukin and Hongkun Park, developed a new approach for nanoscale temperature control inside a living cell...

A team of MIT, Harvard, and the Vienna University of Technology scientists built an all-optical transistor. Using ultracold atoms researchers were able to demonstrate that a single gate photon can control the transmission of hundreds of signal photons...

"After the U.S. entered World War II, things changed on Harvard’s campus. All but two of the Houses filled with military personnel, and faculty members left to take up posts supporting the war effort..."

Each year, the undergraduate members of Alpha Iota, the Harvard College chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Soclety, award Excellence in Teaching Prize to three members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences...

Long before GPS, Google Earth, and global transit, humans traveled vast distances using only environmental clues and simple instruments. John Huth asks what is lost when modern technology substitutes...